[Boost-users] [Test] redirecting unit test report

From: Kim Barrett (kab_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-08-19 23:01:27

At 8:25 PM -0400 8/19/05, Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
>  > In 1.33, the descriptive text is printed to std::cerr
>
>  I think you are mistaken. Log entries by default should appear in std::cout.

Oh drat! The test case in question is announcing failure via an
assert(). That's where the unwanted output to std::cerr is coming
from. Sorry for the bogus report.

>  > Now, I never really liked redirecting stderr to a file in order to
>  > capture the report. What if something in the test program were to
>  > write to stderr? (Which is exactly what is happening now.) I see that
>  > there is now (in 1.33) a mechanism for setting the stream used by the
>  > report generator (boost:unit_test::results_reporter::set_stream()).
>  > But after spending the last couple of days pouring over the
>  > documentation and sources for Boost.Test, I have no idea where I
>  > would put a call to that function that doesn't involve patching the
>  > Boost.Test sources. There doesn't seem to be a place to insert such
>  > user code, at least not that I can find. Have I overlooked something,
>  > or is this really a hole in the present design / implementation?
>
>  There several thing you could do:
>
>  1. Check your redirection. Log should appear in std::cout. While report
>  should appear in std::cerr
>  2. You could set a --log_level=nothing (witch is a good idea for automated
>  test runners anyway) and no log entries will appear

My test runner allows the log level to be specified. When running it
by hand (rather than from a chron job or the like), it can be helpful
to see the log information go by on the screen, both from a progress
reporting point of view, and also for immediate error context.

>  3. You could redirect log and/or report streams. Put configure testcase as a
>  first one in a module:
>
>  BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE( configure )
>  {
>      boost::unit_test::results_reporter::set_stream( report );
>      boost::unit_test::unit_test_log::set_stream( log );
>  }

Eew! What if somebody decides to use the new random order feature of
the test framework? I guess this is a usable workaround for now, but
I really think there needs to be some capability to insert user code
into the process in a more controlled fashion.